Tag: Soviet Union

The Legacy Of Failure In Afghanistan Starts In 1979, Not 2001- OpEd

Chin@Strategy

A decade ago, John Lamberton Harper, a professor of US Foreign Policy and European Studies at Johns Hopkins in Bologna, Italy published an indispensable history of the first cold war (The Cold War, Oxford University Press, 2011) in which he described the origins of what became known as “the Carter doctrine.” The Carter Doctrine pledged US military action against any state that attempted to gain control of the Persian Gulf. As Quincy Institute president Andrew Bacevich has pointed out it “implied the conversion of the Persian Gulf into an informal…

Will China Fall Into the Afghanistan Trap?

Chin@Strategy

Although the narrative of Afghanistan as the graveyard of empires is a bit overdone – and tends to ignore imperial success stories like that of  Darius I of Persia or Alexander the Great in antiquity – there is more than a little truth to it. In modern times, British, Soviet and now American efforts to bring the country into their respective geopolitical orbits have met with decisive, and humiliating, defeat. And in the Soviet case at least, that defeat contributed directly to the fall of the empire itself. But what…